Verbal Inflection in Hindi: A Distributed Morphology Approach

In this paper, we provide a complete description of Hindi verbal inflection within the framework of Distributed morphology. We discuss the categories that are visible on the verb itself and on associated auxiliaries. We show how both analysis and generation are possible using this model. We also discuss the implementation of such linguistically motivated analysis in a morphological analyzer for Hindi, one of the several NLP tools that we have developed for Hindi, and discuss the outcomes of such an implementation. In this paper, we present an analysis of Hindi verbal inflection in the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM) (Halle and Marantz 1993 1994, Harley and Noyer 2003). The analysis presented in this paper demonstrates how DM may be used to provide a systematic and economical account of verbal inflection in Hindi. This DM analysis also lends itself straightforwardly to implementation in a Hindi Morphological Analyzer. We begin by detailing the different inflectional categories of Hindi verbs and the morphemes that realize them. Using the tools of DM we demonstrate how Hindi verbal forms can be both generated and analysed. The Hindi Morphological Analyzer that implements this analysis, produces the root, the suffixes and the morpheme analyses for any given verbal form. We would like to show that a linguistically motivated analysis provides a completely natural and successful way of implementing NLP tools.